Saturday, October 31, 2009

this/these premises

I was in London yesterday, and blew some money on a black cab, since a cancel(l)ed train had made me late. While paused at a stop light, I read a notice outside a (BrE) railwaystation/(orig. AmE) train station that said something like "This premises closed for necessary maintenance", which left me wondering: whoever says this premises instead of these premises? When one encounters unfamiliar forms or usages in a dialect other than one's own, one naturally suspects that one overuses the impersonal pronoun that the form is native to the other dialect and not one's own. My methodology for discovering whether this is true: search for the phrase on the web, then search for the phrase only on UK sites on the web. If one of the forms has a UK proportion that is out of line with the alternative form, then assume that form is BrE. So, for instance:

59% of the global instances of (BrE)climbing frameare from UK siteswhereas only about 1 in 27 global instances of jungle gym are UKish

23% of the world's this premises are on UK sites24% of the world's these premises are on UK sitesThis premises accounts for about 11% of the total this/these premises in the UK.

It looks like the British use the singular version to some extent, but probably were not the originators of it, or else we'd probably see them having a greater proportion of the world hits.

I also compared .ac.uk sites versus .edu sites as a way of comparing UK and US that avoids the trap of the international .com.

About 3% of this/these premises on .ac.uk sites were this premises.About 1.5% of this/these premises on .edu sites were this premises.

So, it does not seem to be a feature of 'educated' language, but it's more common in BrE academic circles than AmE ones.

So whose form is it? My money was on Australian English, which gives us this window dressing:

(click photo for source)

Comparing world hits to .au hits gives us:

1 in 19 these premises is Australian1 in 4 this premises is AustralianAustralians write this premises 37% of the time.

And, consistent with these findings, Australians are fairly happy to write the premises is (40%) rather than the premises are.

(Feel free to repeat the exercise with New Zealand and South Africa to see if it is general antipodean English--I'm coming down with a severe case of Googler's neck.)

But then I was re-reading Arnold Zwicky's post from last month about this premises (looking at why it is that something with an apparent plural suffix would be treated as a singular), I noticed mollymooly's comment (hello!): 'Irish law treats “premises” as singular, e.g. “any premises or any part of a premises” in S.60(2)b of the Insurance Act'. And, whoa, look at this:

Irish English uses the premises is and this premises nearly twice as often as the premises are and these premises.16% (1 in 6) of the this premises on the web are Irish.1 in 75 of the these premises on the web are Irish.

Which is to say that you only had to read all that about Australian English because I wrote it before reading M's comment. And, to be honest, I'm fairly surprised to find it so close to England, but so far as well. Did the Australians get it from the Irish, or is it arising separately there? Are the proportions in Scotland different from those in England? Those are questions I'm not prepared to answer.

(God knows, someone new to the blog is going to want to mention math(s) in the comments. Don't do that. Click here instead.)

Definitely, definitely, definitely, only "these premises" BrE. If I saw this premises on a station notice, I would assume illiteracy (but now I would assume an Irish or Australian writer).

John Cowan, you've stolen my thunder. But I think it works better in the form I have heard it, with someone famous (variously Dr Johnson, or some Oxbridge academic) walking down the street and observing two women shouting at one another from their respective houses.

Until I read further down that "this premises" was Australian and/or Irish, I (BrE) would have classified it along with a greengrocer's apostrophe, as an error. Interesting to know that it is correct in other dialects of English!

Hmm. 'on this premises' does sound illiterate at first glance (BrE), but then 'on the premises' (as in 'no smoking on the premises') doesn't, and 'on this premise', unless referring to logical terms, sounds completely wrong. Maybe because legally 'premises' in England are considered to be a collection of things (buildings, outbuildings, grounds) that, like trousers, can have no singular? I shall listen out for what the Scots say.

If Wikipedia is right about the origin of premises, ie it comes from standard wording in the recitals of contracts for the sale of land, where the phrase "in the premises" (meaning something like "in light of what has just been said") is used, then it cannot logically be used in the singular.

@townmouse: It's just not a completely logical thing, though. Premises does include all the buildings on a property, but chattel, furniture, and livestock all describe different kinds of multiple things without an -s.

As an AusE speaker I don't recall ever seeing "this premises". Though evidence suggests that I'm just blind/auto-correct/don't speak my own dialect. It still sounds wrong to me, but not malicious, just that it may be a common error. Like its/it's, etc.

Looking at the sign I could correct it two ways. Change this to these (and insert are) or insert an apostrophe to make premise's. Or am I alone in being able to use premise like that?

@ hicks - but if you insert an apostrophe, you are implying either that something belongs to the premise, or that a letter has been omitted, neither of which is true in this case! I think inserting an apostrophe really would be a grammatical error in any dialect of English!

I agree that "The premises" would avoid any complication... but if it was a case of "No smoking on", I think I'd prefer "these premises".

The relevant sense in the OED (reviesed September 2009) is premise3(b) which is marked "In pl[ural]", with a note "Now also occas[ionally] with sing[ular] concord." The only singular citation is "He'd knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times." from 'Utterly Monkey' (2005) by Nick Laird from Cookstown, County Tyrone.

Other plural words now singular in Ireland are:- bollocks, in the sense "scrotum" and by extension "dickhead";- hames: originally a pair of hames was a horse-collar; now to "make a hames of" something is to make a mess of it.

I have a question for the non-Americans. Does the phrase "on this premises" sound uneducated, as suggested by townmouse, or just plain bizarre? If I were to come across that phrase, I (an American) would just assume it to be a typo regardless of the educational level of the person who wrote it.

I am sure the linguists have a proper term, but this would be the difference between a non-standard usage (such as me an him went to the store) and a complete non-usage. Perhaps it's all the 's'ing at the end of premises that underscores the plural-ness of the word, and that makes the use of the singular sound so strange.

@Matt: I think the distinction you are looking for is between "non-standard grammar" and "non-grammaticality".

Everybody has some familiarity with non-standard grammars, at least at the level of comic stereotypes. But it's difficult to see how one can decide whether a bizarre-looking sequence is non-grammatical (ie a mistake), or some unknown non-standard grammar produced by someone speaking/writing the way they normally do. I suppose the more bizarre it seems, the more likely it is to be a mistake, but that's at best a rule of thumb. Clearly, a lot of people would (incorrectly) regard the Hiberno-English standard as a mistake.

In other news, I wonder whether there is any dialect variation in the use of "ground(s)" in the sense of "basis, cause, reason". Google gives approximately equal matches for "rejected on the grounds that" and "rejected on the ground that". The former is the only possible option when there are multiple reasons. The latter is logical when there is a single reason, but I think I would nevertheless use the plural in such situation. On the other hand, whereas "grounds" is undoubtedly plural for me --I would use "on these grounds"--, it seems to be singular for some --Google gives lots of hits for "on this grounds".

@Chaa006: Thanks for that--it didn't sound quite BrE to me when I wrote it, but couldn't think of the alternative, so I looked up stop light in the OED, which didn't mark it as AmE, so I just stuck with it. Should've been a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period in there somewhere...phew!

AusE speaker here... so are you all saying that there is such a thing as a "premise" (in terms of a building)? I have not heard this usage before.

I would not think of the "s" ending making a plural, but rather that the word "premises" is just a word that ends in "s". Is it ever said, for example, "No smoking on this premise"? If the place in question is one building, does that make it a premise?

Hmm, I sound cranky in the above, but I'm really only rather bemused by the concept of "these premises" being correct, when referring to one premises. (See what I did there?)